Health2 min(s) read
Published 18:19 09 Jan 2021 GMT
A Texas mom is issuing a warning after her five-year-old daughter was placed on a ventilator in the intensive care unit when she contracted a rare Covid-related illness that affects children.
As reported by Good Morning America, five-year-old Peyton, of Weatherford, Texas, the daughter of Tara Copeland, was diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, also known as MIS-C, at the end of December.
The diagnosis came a month after Tara and her husband both tested positive for Covid-19. Their five children, including Peyton, also started showing symptoms of the disease.
Some weeks after all seven members of the Copeland family had recovered from the virus, Peyton woke up on Christmas Day with a "low-grade fever" and a headache.
Peyton was treated for strep throat at an urgent care clinic the following day, however, her symptoms only worsened.
"By the night of the 27th she came down with a really bad rash and by this time her lips were swollen, her eyes were bloodshot and her face was starting to swell," Tara said. "She still had a horrible headache and stomachache and kept waking up in pain."
So, Tara took Peyton to the emergency room at Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth the next morning. It was there that Peyton was diagnosed with MIS-C, a condition Tara had never heard of before.
"They tested her for Covid-19 and said she was negative for Covid but she was positive for antibodies, and they started doing more lab work and figured out she probably had MIS-C," said Tara.
"By that night she was in the ICU and about 4 p.m. the next day she was put on a ventilator," she added.
Per GMA, MIS-C results in various organs in the body becoming inflamed. It occurs in children who have contracted the virus that causes Covid-19, according to Dr. Nicholas Rister, an infectious disease specialist at Cook Children's Hospital.
"It's frustrating because we don't know the exact link to why is Covid doing this in particular," Rister told the outlet.
He continued:
"What we've seen previously with other infections in children, and in adults too, your immune system gets really revved up, and starts driving inflammation, which normally isn't bad because that's how your body drives off infections.
"The problem with these post-infection inflammation syndromes is that you're post the infection so these kids have already had COVID and they've either recovered from it or they've had very mild symptoms, but now for some reason, their immune system gets highly turned on, and that's where you start to see the fevers, the rashes, the irritability."
